Kester Brewin

I’ve not yet read the full book that Alain de Botton has been promoting recently, but I’ve read a number of interviews and heard him speak, and browsed his website: religionforatheists.com and I wanted to post a couple of first-thoughts about his thesis.

Firstly, he’s being unashamed to say that he is ‘picking and mixing’ from different religions. As he puts here, ‘even if religion isn’t true, can’t we enjoy the best bits?’

It seems that there is a twin move here. Atheists like de Botton are moving towards religion, to try to colonise the secular space which still values ritual, and many religious people are moving towards an atheist reading of their faith… both agree that ‘God is dead’… but what to do with the carcass?

It seems to me that de Botton and others want to pick over the beautiful, to grab rituals and art and the ‘awe-some.’ One of de Botton’s earlier books, which I like a lot, is The Consolations of Philosophy, and I wonder now if this is simply an upgrade: religion as no more than consolation. We feel lonely, we suffer, we don’t earn enough…so here’s a smash and grab on some religious ideas that seem to have helped console people in the past.

I don’t think this is enough. I think religion as consolation is little more than religion as emotional crutch. It’s low challenge, middle-class angst with stained glass windows, and intellectually and psychologically impoverished.

The religious who are turning to an atheist reading of their faith are doing something different. God is dead, but that means that we have to take up the challenges of that absence… and that’s perhaps a more demanding road. I can’t speak from anything more than a Christian perspective on this, but it seems to me that this is not so much gaining ‘ahhh’ moments from beautiful buildings, but taking a long hard look at the scorched earth once those buildings have been torched, and wondering what is left.

Because an atheist reading of Christianity is not about polite rituals and ‘big society’ moments of collective goo. It is not about human beings rejecting God and becoming atheists. It is about God rejecting God and becoming an atheist himself. The core of Christianity is as radical as that. Jesus beat de Botton to ‘religion for atheists’ by about 2000 years; the problem is, the path he set out was so challenging that it has been almost totally rejected. Why? Because the move from religion to an atheist reading of religion is not about experiencing the sacred in the remains of religious beauty, but about experiencing the abandonment and desolation, the responsibility to the rest of humanity, when we realise the sacred is not found in the stain glass, but in the slum outside the church.

God’s life created fissures within society between the believers and unbelievers. It seems God’s death will be no less divisive… but this time I wonder if the polite ‘crutch’ accusation will be made the other way.

In the most high-profile action against the US Senate’s ‘Protect Intellectual Property’ Bill (PIPA) and the House of Representatives’ ‘Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Wikipedia has begun an English language black-out of its main site.

As you’ll know if you read here often, I’m in the depths of a book-length piece on piracy. The aim is to look at the multiple forms of piracy – from Somalia to the internet to music to books to historic figures, fictional heroes and children’s fascination with everything pirate – and formulate some general principles that link all of them together.

It’s an ambitious project, but it’s going well, and I do believe that the thesis is not only a good one, but a timely one too. Piracy, and interest in it, is exploding in all areas of culture and commerce. So it seems high time to think intelligently not just about what piratic activity is going on, but why it is happening.

What I find interesting about these cases is that the US have become the world leaders in trying to battle piracy – and protecting their own intellectual property… and yet this is a country which was founded on pirate principles of minimal copyright. Why? Because the founding fathers understood that progress was only possible if the poorest had free access to knowledge – which at the time meant books. For decades the US refused to sign up to international book copyright agreements.

It seems that PIPA and SOPA are laws designed to protect the wealthy. These are people who have enclosed things that many consider should be part of the ‘commons’ – knowledge, code, biology, songs – and are unwilling to allow access that doesn’t go via their paywall. That may be good for their share price, but is no good for, as Henry Hill the book pirate of 1680 put it, ‘the benefit of the poor.’

The key question that has to be asked is this: why is piracy proliferating? Is it because people are naturally tight, and don’t want to pay? I don’t think so. I think it’s becoming so common because people are so fed up with the narrowed and capitalised world that demands taxation and profit at every turn.

If you’re reading this blog post, you are almost certainly doing so on a digital device made in China. And that means you’re almost certainly doing so on a device made in Shenzhen.

Don’t know where Shenzhen is? Neither did I. It’s here:

View Larger Map

It’s a city bigger than New York or London, yet it was built only in the last 30 years. It’s one of China’s largest manufacturing hubs, and thus where ‘all our shit’ gets made. By hand. In 15 hour shifts. By workers as young as 12.

Conditions are poor. Really poor. You would not want to do this, and you would not want your children to do this. No one is allowed to speak while on shift.

If you use these products, which we all do, and if they’ve helped save you hours of labour time by speeding up communication, then you can damn well afford the 40 mins it will take to sit and listen to this piece on This American Life about a reporter who went to the factories of Shenzhen, and what he found. Let me put it more clearly: if you are reading this, you have a duty to listen to this.

Do it now.

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Having listened, I’ve been thinking about the workers there, and it seems that things are coming to a head in terms of protest. Here’s a Reuters report from yesterday:

Thousands of Chinese workers protesting over compensation and job security at a Sanyo Electric Co Ltd plant clashed with police in southern Shenzhen, media said on Monday, the latest outbreak of labor unrest in China’s manufacturing hub.

In case that leaves you panicked – don’t be. The article continues: ‘No impact was expected on clients from the stoppage at the factory…’ Phew. All your devices will still get made.

The FoxConn plant, which makes pretty much all of Apple’s products, as well as things for other major brands, was also in the news as a ‘mass suicide’ was planned a few days ago by 150 workers protesting at appalling conditions there.

I’ve blogged about this here before (Expensive Machines Made by Cheap People), but I do think it’s high time that people began to take more notice, and put pressure on Apple and others to demand that conditions are improved. Yes, that’ll mean we pay more for products… but do you not kind of think that that’s worth it?

With the writing I’m doing on piracy I have been mulling whether conditions in these factories are in any way analogous to the oppressive regimes sailors found themselves in in the early 1700′s. In both cases they were doing semi-skilled hard labour that made other people incredibly rich, but left them injured and impoverished. The question is, what would a Chinese manufacturing piracy look like? Hijacking of containers of new iPhones ready for export? Now THAT would get the Hipsters in a twist to do something…

It seems extraordinary that in a Communist country workers are having to battle for fair access to the wealth that is being created… but as Western capitalism finds a new host with cheaper labour, it’s perhaps not surprising at all. I’m really not sure what the best step forward is here, and how it might best be possible to put pressure on Apple and others… any ideas or links, do share please.

Some thoughts to share on sharing thoughts…

“If you have an apple, and I have an apple, and we exchange apples, then you and I will still have one apple. But if you have an idea, and I have an idea, and we exchange ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.” George Bernard Shaw.

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” Thomas Jefferson.

“The Iliad and The Odyssey can be spread throughout the world without anyone being deprived of them as a consequence.” Lewis Hyde

I’ve been thinking about these ideas (known in economics as non-excludable and non-rival goods) in relation to a novel I’m writing.

One of the things that’s struck me is that the shared project of human progress has moved away from these non-rival principles and become ‘excludable.’ The principles of profit mean that ideas that might be placed in the commons for the benefit of all are high-fenced, so only those who can pay get a look in, and those who consider themselves the ‘creator’ get infinite compensation for their stroke of genius. Feels a long way from Jefferson’s original American vision…

I received a present the other day – a book through the post from an ex-colleague: ‘Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition.’ It’s a fascinating read. Admittedly, I was a little wary: there’s a long history of ‘actually, they were gay’ books which would have us believe that Jesus, St Paul, Shakespeare and even George Michael [...]

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Micah Redding has an interesting post bouncing off some of the thoughts I’ve posted here, which reflects on baptism, and whether this represents a ‘ritual to signify the end of rituals.’ My immediate thought was of the lines from the Bhagavad-Gita, made famous by J Robert Oppenheimer in an interview in which he recorded his thoughts [...]

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Skull/Heart/Guts This skin-bag barely containing wild raw nature cortex-capped, with dipping cord spine-tingling nervously into the maelstrom below; calcium throne above shuddering brittly at the thought of battles and struggles death and love and chemicals; in the middle, my heart. ©KB Nov 2011